Followers

Friday, November 18, 2016

Trevor Noah, the South African comedian and
host of The Daily Show, a popular late-night news satire and talk show in the
US, once described Donald Trump as America’s first African President. In fact, Americans could do worse than look to
the continent in general, and Kenya in particular, for a preview of what life
under a Trump administration would be like.

President-elect Trump and Kenya’s President
Uhuru Kenyatta have much in common. Both are fabulously wealthy, the children
of privilege with questionable success in business, and both have been accused
of fanning ethnic and racial hatreds. Both have risen to head their respective
countries in the most unlikely of circumstances and in the face of global
opprobrium. While many across the world echewed Trump’s xenophobia and reckless
approach to international affairs, Kenyatta had faced similar opposition to his
candidacy three years earlier. This was a consequence of his -and his running
mate’s - indictment at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in relation
to Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence in which over 1000 people died.

Trump and Kenyatta even have similar ideas
about how countries should be governed.

Take their shared suspicion and contempt
for the media. Where Trump has called journalists “scum”, “illegitimate” and “horrible
people” and declared his aim to make it easier to sue them, Kenyatta regularly derides
newspapers as only good or wrapping meat, and his administration has introduced
new laws meant to stifle independent reporting. It has arrested and beaten journalists who persist in asking uncomfortable questions, and,
leveraging its advertising and regulatory muscle, leaned on media houses to fire them or to pull their stories. Just recently, in
response to a spate of corruption stories, Kenyatta declared that the media
should be required to prove any allegation of government graft they dared to report
on or face the consequences.

When it comes to fighting terrorists, their
pronouncements are also remarkably similar. Both prefer to speak in vague and
bombastic terms and to demonize Muslim refugees and immigrants rather than offer
detailed policy prescriptions. Trump says his plan for defeating ISIS is a
secret whose details he won’t be revealing to the public any time soon. One
hopes he’ll be sharing them with the generals since he claims to know more
about fighting the extremists than they do. The Kenyatta administration, after
all, has taken more than three years to come up with a strategy to tackle radicalization and is no closer than Trump to
articulating a strategy to defeat the Al Shabaab, the Somali based terror group
that has murdered nearly 800 Kenyans, most of them after Kenyatta took office.

There is also the question of whether Trump
will follow through on his oft-repeated promised to get Mexico to pay for a
wall on the US’ southern border to keep out immigrants (which Mexico has repeatedly
vowed not to do). Here too, Kenyatta can offer some guidance. Depending on
which of its officials you choose to believe, the Kenyatta government is building
a wall to keep out terrorists either along the entire 700km border with Somalia, or just on a small section near the border town of Mandera. It may or may not be a
physical barrier (there has been some talk of a human wall) whose construction
is either ongoing or has stalled.

In addition to the wall, Trump has vowed to
round up and deport illegal immigrants whom he says are gaming and mooching off
the system, driving up crime, taking jobs and opportunities away from US
citizens and depressing US wages. That little of this is true doesn’t seem to
matter a whole lot. Similarly, the Kenyatta regime has developed a fondness for
demonizing refugees from Somalia, blaming them for everything from terrorist attacks
to being a drain on the Kenyan economy, as a way of distracting from its own
failures. In 2014, under operation Usalama Watch, it begun rounding up and
deporting them, and restricting those that remained to the Dadaab and Kakuma
refugee camps in the desolate north. Then, earlier this year, the government
declared it would close the Dadaab camp by the end of November and has been effectively
dumping hapless and unwilling refugees back into their war-ravaged country ever
since. (That effort has now been suspended following an international outcry).

In September 2013, the prolific Ugandan
columnist, Charles Onyango-Obbo, wrote that the International Criminal Court “had finally made Kenya an African country”. What he meant was that as the government
worked to scuttle the cases against the President and his deputy (and with them
any prospect of accountability for the 2008 violence), it had brought the
country into closer alignment with authoritarian regimes in vogue across much
of the rest of the continent. In similar fashion, it is perhaps not so far off the
mark to suggest that with the election of Donald Trump, the US too has become
something of an African country.

Friday, November 11, 2016

To describe Donald
Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in Tuesday’s US presidential election as a
shocking upset is probably the understatement of the year. It is a seismic
political upheaval which will rock, not just the American political system, but
the entire edifice of Western liberal democracy, to its core.

Coming just months
after the Brexit referendum in which citizens of the United Kingdom voted against
all expectations to leave the European Union, which has been the lynchpin of
that continent’s peace and prosperity for nearly three-quarters of a century,
Trump’s win is, as the Financial Times declared, “another grievous blow to the
liberal international order” and “a thunderous repudiation of the status quo”.

Little captures just
how thunderous that rejection was than the fact that a national exit poll suggested that as many as 61 per cent of voters viewed Trump as “not qualified” to be
President. He is the only candidate to ever be elected who did not have a smidgen
of either governmental or military experience.

Over the coming days, there will be much soul-searching and
head-scratching over how this came to pass and what it means. But at this early
stage one thing is abundantly clear from Brexit and Trumpocalypse: large
numbers of people in the West feel they have somehow missed out despite living
in the one racial, geographic and ideological polity that more than any other
has benefited from the existing globalized system.

Demagogic campaigns on
both sides of the Atlantic profited from perceptions that the system was not
working for the people, that unaccountable governing elites had signed them up
to global trade agreements and policies, particularly on immigration, without their
consent. “Take our country back” was a
common rallying cry. Substantial portions of the unhappy population became prey
to a narrative that demonized immigrants as terrorists and free loaders and
recommended retreat from the global system as a solution to domestic woes.

Trump’s triumph highlights
fundamental questions about the structure and accountability of the post-Cold
War global order, questions that have for too long been swept under a neo-liberal
carpet. As Los Angeles Times’ journalist Vincent Bevins noted, “both Brexit and
Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban
elites have refused to ask for 30 years.”

The focus has tended
to be on economic growth which disproportionately benefited a few at the very top
with little attention paid to widening inequality. In the past, elites have ignored
the voices of those who lost out in globalization by, for example, hiding
behind high walls and riot police to escape anti-WTO protests in the last
decade.

This time, however, they had run out of places to hide.

There are valuable lessons
here for Kenya’s elite. Like their counterparts around the world, Kenya's punditry has predictably reacted with horror at the calamity that has befallen the US. “America does the unthinkable” wailed the Daily
Nation, which bemoaned the fact that the US electorate had rejected “a smart
politician with 30 years of experience” in favor of “a foul-mouthed casino
owner and showman with an alligator-sized ego and, reportedly, the sexual
morals of an alley cat”.

However, the fact is Kenyan
voters, faced with a system that for 50 years has functioned to enrich a small
coterie of politicians at their expense, has been regularly electing local versions
of Trump -from a president indicted for crimes against humanity to members of parliament and governors implicated in corruption and drug trafficking. Like their Western counterparts, Kenya’s ruling elite have
steadfastly ignored the demands for reform and accountability, the stark and
growing inequality and the rumblings of discontent from the masses who have
little to show for a half century of independence.

In that time, the
political system has largely functioned to legitimize the power of rulers
rather than to give voice to citizen concerns. What journalist and
constitutional lawyer, Glen Grenwald, wrote of the West following the Brexit vote is just as true here. “Instead
of acknowledging and addressing the fundamental flaws within themselves,
[elites] are devoting their energies to demonizing the victims of their
corruption, all in order to delegitimize those grievances and thus relieve
themselves of responsibility to meaningfully address them.” Few will have
forgotten President Uhuru Kenyatta’s attempts to fault ordinary Kenyans for the
failure of his administration to deal with insecurity and corruption.

As in the West, the increasingly
desperate electorate has fallen prey to populist, nativist and xenophobic
rhetoric which has tended to blame religious and ethnic minorities as well as
refugees. And elections have proven to have little to do with the ability of candidates to
actually solve problems but rather seem to produce a rogue’s gallery of the
corrupt, the bigoted and the criminal.

Democracy works when
governments are evaluated on their performance, and when citizens watch whether
governments keep their promises, and oust those that don’t measure up. Such
accountability improves the provision of public goods, boosting incomes and
welfare and reinforcing the sense of national belonging.

On the other hand,
when the citizenry feels disillusioned about its ability to meaningfully participate
in decision-making and to hold public officials to account, then politicians are
evaluated on much less noble attributes: their capacity for patronage or even to
what extent their election constitutes flashing the finger to the oligarchy –their ability to
be what film maker Michael Moore described as “your personal Molotov cocktail to throw right into the center of the bastards who did this to you!”

Trump’s election is
therefore a wakeup call. There is a crisis of accountability and inclusion in
democracies around the world and it calls us to engage in the wok of
reimagining and reforming our governance systems so they better respond to the
circumstances and problems of ordinary people rather than those of the elites
who lord it over them.

Saturday, November 05, 2016

With that statement,
two weeks ago President Uhuru Kenyatta seemed to throw his hands up in
resignation. The most powerful man in the land claiming to be powerless in the
face of the rampant stealing of public resources that has now become the
hallmark of his administration.

It surely does
seem that everything the Jubilee administration touches turns to loot. Few of
the projects it has initiated over the last 43 months -from laptops for
schoolkids to the Standard Gauge Railway to the free maternity programme- have escaped
the reek of corruption. Anti-corruption crusader, John Githongo, says it is “by
far the most corrupt government in our history”.

And he should know. As
head of the Office of Governance and Ethics. he famously blew the lid off the
Angloleasing scandal, which annihilated the Mwai Kibaki regime’s anti-graft
credentials and earned him death threats and exile. Few will have forgotten how
in 2004 the then British High Commissioner, Edward Clay, described the gluttonous
Kibaki acolytes as “vomit[ing] all over our shoes”.

It is all so very
different from the euphoria that accompanied Kibaki’s electoral triumph and
assumption of office a year earlier. Then, it seemed, Kenya was well on the way
to slaying the proverbial corruption dragon. Kibaki and his National Rainbow
Coalition allies, including Raila Odinga, had built their campaign on an
unabashedly anti-corruption platform, promising to end the plunder the country
had experienced under his predecessors, Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi.

Their campaign against
Moi’s “project” to install Uhuru Kenyatta as his successor, brought together
many of the leading lights of the decades-long agitation against the KANU
dictatorship (and not a few opportunistic politicians). Their sweeping victory
raised expectations for change to stratospheric levels. Imbued with the belief
that all was possible, that they were “unbwogable”, Kenyans were arresting
corrupt policemen on the street and expecting their new government to start doing
the same to corrupt politicians.

However, the
revelations of continuing theft in high place coupled with the de facto
immunity afforded to Nyayo era thieves, would bring such hope crashing down to
earth. And there seems no end to the hangover from those euphoric days, each
election has bought a government more corrupt than the last.

How did we come to
this?

In their insightful
book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of
Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson identify
the nature of a country’s institutions, whether extractive or inclusive, as the
primary determinant of its success. But unlike Kenya, where we equate
institutions to an alphabet soup of organisations, Acemoglu and Robinson
describe institutions as simply the rules, written and unwritten, that
influence how systems work. Countries where such rules encourage participation
by the masses, distribute political power broadly and subject it to constraint
will tend to be successful whereas, as Kenyans can attest to from experience,
those where the distribution of power is narrow and unconstrained will end up
with systems geared to enrich a powerful few at the expense of the rest.

The primary reason why
Kenya’s war against corruption remains little more than words on paper is
because we are focused on changing personalities and organisations rather than
the rules, or institutions, that underpin the system we inherited from the
British colonials. In 1963 it was all about getting rid of the “colonial
masters”. Half a century later, it was all about “Moi must go”. As the report
of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission demonstrated, the rules of
the game remained mostly unchanged. The government still functioned as a
vehicle of plunder, with the only difference being that in place of white
oppressors, we had black ones.

The inauguration of a
new constitution in 2010 was the first real effort to address this system but
here again, form is triumphing over substance. The fact of its passage
continues to be hailed as a success (and it is) even as its spirit is crushed.
Nominally independent institutions, such as the police and the Director of
Public Prosecutions, remain, for all intents and purposes, subservient to the
Presidential whim. Parliament, too, is little more than a lackey for the
executive. The political sphere still largely excludes participation by most
citizens in everyday governance while continuing to be the dominant influence over
their lives. Impunity for wielders of political power is still the norm.

Passing the new
constitution was just a necessary first step. As at independence, the real work
lies in its implementation and in overthrowing the authoritarian substructure
of the state to fit the aspirations the document espouses. This is where we are
failing. The exclusive focus on prosecutions and convictions (which are
necessary) sadly elides this.

It is true that the
constitution limits the role of the President in punishing offenders. But this
is not the problem. Where the President has been largely absent is in
articulating and leading the necessary reform to ensure that the state delivers
the system that the constitution he swore to uphold envisages.

That, Mr
President, is what we want you to do.

In the end, however,
it is up to the people to insist that their politicians respect the rules and values
espoused by the constitution. It is up to us to insist that accountability and
transparency rather than secrecy and impunity become the hallmarks of how the
public business is conducted. It is up to us to change the political calculus
that the Uhuru administration makes.

John Githongo is wrong
when he says “the era of fighting graft using public policy reform and
technical fixes has ended.” We still need to think through how we make the
system work for the masses of the people, and not just for a small elite. But
he is right when he says it requires political will. Only what matters is not political
will on the part of Uhuru Kenyatta but rather the political will of the Kenyan
citizenry to hold him to account.